ArchWiki:Requests

Is the wiki missing documentation for a popular software package or coverage of an important topic? Or, is existing content in need of correction, updating, or expansion? Write your requests below and share your ideas...

Problem redirects

Creation requests

Here, list requests for topics that you think should be covered on ArchWiki. If not obvious, explain why ArchWiki coverage is justified (rather than existing Wikipedia articles or other documentation). Furthermore, please consider researching and creating the initial article yourself (see Help:Editing for content creation help).

HOWTO: SAMBA PDC + LDAP

How to configure SAMBA PDC + LDAP in Arch Linux? (Moved from another page. Hokstein 19:57, 16 September 2007 (EDT))

Tripwire

Finding information on the install of this program already requires a bit of searching around the net, and then a variety of modifications to get it running correctly. It would be nice to have a good HowTo about the install and setup of Tripwire on Arch. The package is availabe in community.

It has since been removed from [community], it's in the AUR now. -- Karol 21:52, 29 August 2011 (EDT)

Create a dedicate page for system upgrade

I am thinking whether we should create a dedicate page for system upgrade. This page can record the manual intervention required. Arch News usually contain short message. This page can add more information.

Modification requests

Here, list requests for correction or other modification of existing articles. Only systemic modifications that affect multiple articles should be included here. If a specific page needs modification, use that page's discussion or talk page instead and one of the #General requests templates.

As a rolling release，Arch constantly receive update and improvement. Arch wiki have to be updated quickly to reflect the changes.

net-tools -> iproute2

net-tools is dead upstream, and Arch has switched to using iproute2 for initscripts. net-tools isn't a dependency of anything in base, and isn't in the base group itself - we shouldn't assume it is installed anymore.

Iproute2 includes several utilities, and one in particular that seeks to combine the functionality of several of the net-tools utilities. It is called `ip` and effectively replaces the functionality of `ifconfig`, `route`, `iptunnel`, `ipmaddr`.

ifconfig -> ip addr, ip link

route -> ip route

arp -> ip neigh [Done]

vconfig- > ip link

iptunnel -> ip tunnel

ipmaddr -> ip maddr

netstat -> ss

wireless_tools -> iw

In addition to the net-tools deprecated, commands like iwconfig and iwlist are deprecated too. These should be updated to the appropriate iw commands.

iwconfig -> iw

iwlist scan -> iw scan

networking syntex change in initscripts

The new networking syntax in initscripts also only allows you to configure 1 interface. People have to use netcfg or another solution for complex situations, which might require further changes on the wiki.

ck-launch-session dbus-launch and friends

Help:Style#Hypertext_metaphor taken to extreme: while searching for some hints on the exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch yourwm thing, I found myself tracking a piece of referenced info that has fallen victim to some daisy-chain mania.

Fluxbox tells you to check Xinitrc: "See Xinitrc for more details." Once there you learn that it has something to do with Policykit ... or Xfce, as you're told to "See also the notes of Xfce#Manually for more details.". Let's see what's on PolicyKit's page first. "Please note: to correct issues with automount and shutdown, please check the ConsoleKit page."" ConsoleKit was a disappointment for me, seems the princess is in another castle. Let's see that Xfce article mentioned earlier. Indeed, Xfce#Manually seems to have the most info about the issue, but not by much.

Unfortunately we don't have tools to see such "double-redirects" and lacking expertise in this particular issue is definitely a factor. Can someone please untangle this mess? -- Karol 16:37, 19 October 2011 (EDT)

udev update

[2] says that "The long deprecated keys: SYSFS=, ID=, BUS= have been removed." (among other changes). Many wiki articles use them in the udev rules.

MediaWiki Visual Editor

References to the Visual editor sandbox should me made on the Wiki and BBS, especially where new users will easily come across it. ~ Filam 16:12, 16 December 2011 (EST)

alsaconf removed from alsa-utils

FS#28631 There are many mentions of 'alsaconf' in the wiki. I have no idea whether to just remove them or suggest using some other tool instead. -- Karol 17:16, 8 March 2012 (EST)

Interesting, I think most of the mentions are on the out-of-date laptop pages and I'm not too worried about trying to maintain those. thestinger 00:32, 11 April 2012 (EDT)

Move/Merge articles to external wikis

Although French, Swedish and Finnish have their own wikis, we're still hosting some articles in those languages:

There are actually quite a few dependencies that aren't mentioned, since a broken dependency of pacman would also break pacman (can see them all with pactree -l pacman | sort -u | cut -f 1 -d ' '). The packages that would need to be downloaded and extracted would vary depending on which partial upgrade was done. thestinger 15:19, 21 February 2012 (EST)

vmlinuz26

Instead of flagging all articles still using the old kernel image naming out of date, can we do some mass-renaming? -- Karol 20:55, 20 October 2011 (EDT)

Last week, I found at one article that was using vmlinuz26 in an example for users of non-recent kernel versions. I'm not sure if we would want to keep such an example around, but we may want to decide that before doing a mass rename. And for what it's worth, I don't think it is necessary to keep such antiquated examples around. -- Jstjohn (talk) 20:53, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Of course I don't know what article you're referring to, but doing a mass-renaming with a bot sounds a bit dangerous, because as you've pointed out there may be exceptions where the old kernel names are still ok. I'm moving this discussion out of Bot requests. -- Kynikos (talk) 14:57, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

The rename is done very long time ago. I am stating to change all vmlinuz26 to vmlinuz-linux except few places as mentined above. -- Fengchao (talk) 05:40, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Unified /usr directory

Clearly document the change under gong for a unified /usr

Add TroubleShooting section about any user intervention needed

Clearly warn about pacman force option

In pacman page, the FAQ mentioned pacman -S --force when "file exists in filesystem" without warning clearly that --force may break the system. The pacman#Usage should clearly prevent users from using this option. Maybe something like:

Transition rc.conf/initscripts to systemd

As discussed with Tom Gundersen, the maintainer of initscripts, rc.conf and systemd (see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1136967#p1136967). He recommends we drop the rc.conf for anything which is not DAEMONS and some bits of storage/wired network (as described in the latest rc.conf development version on git). Pages need to be updated because of this change:

polkit rebuild

Current in [testing], is a new polkit package that drops support for consolekit. Now that logind handles sessions, logging in anywhere is enough to register a session properly. To keep the session authorized as local in X11, it needs to be started on the same tty where the login happens.

There is no need for ck-launch-session and friends after this moves. It will still be possible for people to rebuild polkit with the legacy consolekit support, but GNOME is going to drop support for that soon upstream. thestinger (talk) 04:40, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

virtualbox-iso-additions & Co. package name changes

I guess virtualbox-iso-additions is now called virtualbox-guest-iso. There are other changes (virtualbox-modules -> virtualbox-host-modules, virtualbox-source -> virtualbox-host-source) but the old names are not used in English articles.
There may be some other changes (new names, changes to how things work), I only edited that one thing because I know nothing about virtualbox. If no more edits are needed, feel free to close this request. -- Karol (talk) 08:58, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Inconsistent block size value for dd command

There are many examples of the dd command on the ArchWiki and they use various values for the block size option. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what value to use. This is exemplified by the Using DD for disk cloning question on Server Fault. I have also collected a few examples from the ArchWiki (see: User:Filam/Block size#Disparate examples).
In order to make these examples more consistent I would like to either write Block size or Dd. Then any examples could be replaced by references like the Package management style rules.
What do you think of that plan? ~ Filam (talk) 19:45, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

1.) First you have to create a single, big file into which you will install Arch Linux. This command creates a single 1 GB file, only containing zeros - should be enough for a basic Arch Linux installation.

Bot requests

Here, list requests for repetitive, systemic modifications to a series of existing articles to be performed by a wiki bot.

Moving pages

Can we have a bot that will move non-English pages and fix i18n links when the English page gets moved/renamed? SSH -> Secure Shell and Cpufrequtils -> CPU Frequency Scaling and the recent examples. -- Karol 10:47, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

Updating templates

It would be really useful if a bot would crawl the entire wiki and update the old templates to the new ones. Just doing a search and replace of {{Filename| to {{ic| would be amazing. The templates that I believe should be able to safely be converted are the following:

The above templates are the most widely used, so just replacing them would be a godsend. Template:Cli and Template:Command could probably be handled manually. :P

Additionally, it would probably be safe to batch convert <pre> to {{bc|<nowiki> and </pre> to </nowi.ki>}}, and similarly for <code> and <tt> being changed to Template:ic. -- Jstjohn 15:54, 10 December 2011 (EST)

If you're interested I've created a GreaseMonkey script, Wiki Monkey, which I've been using quite successfully in the last weeks. Currently it just replaces the templates and removes multiple line breaks, but it could do much much more. If you have some knowledge of javascript and regular expressions you may also contribute to the project and create new user functions! :) -- Kynikos 08:47, 11 December 2011 (EST)

I started on the basic conversions (where stuff already redirects). A GreaseMonkey script would definitely be better than pywikipediabot when stuff might require intervention (there's a horrible tkinter editor that pywikipediabot uses...). thestinger 11:39, 11 December 2011 (EST)

I'd like to spend some more words on Wiki Monkey, to try and attract some contributors, because I'm sure that despite the need for some development work at the beginning, it has the potential to alleviate wiki maintenance efforts quite a lot in the future: the main script is a greasemonkey file which just requires (includes from "upstream", i.e. my github repo) the most up-to-date version of the "core" script, which in turn provides a high-level API which can then be used to write quite simple JS functions to perform automatic actions in the wiki. User functions can be created separately and just "required" in the main script in the same way the "core" script is required.

But there's more: GreaseMonkey provides some functions that let store some values persistently throughout page changes or reloads, so, by exploiting that feature, it may be possible to make the script perform real bot operations by making it collect lists of articles and perform a series of actions on them automatically or even semi-automatically, which means it would be perfectly able to show the user a preview in the browser for every action to be taken.

All this can be implemented with some Javascript and MediaWiki API knowledge.

I've struck the reference to Template:File in the list above because the named arguments are not the main problem for its conversion! The biggest problem is the fact that File is based on <div>, <code> and <pre>, while Hc is based only on <pre>, and this can make the internal string to be processed differently by MediaWiki.

Also note that Wiki Monkey now handles the named argument translation quite smartly.